Expertise, professionalization and reflexivity in mediating participatory democratic practices: Paradoxes, tensions and possibilities

Transcription

1 Expertise, professionalization and reflexivity in mediating participatory democratic practices: Paradoxes, tensions and possibilities Jason Chilvers 1 Paper for presentation to the INM Symposium Developing Expertise in the Design of Participatory Tools: Professionalization and Diversification of the Public Participation Field, IPSA / AISP 23 rd World Congress, Montreal, July, 2014 DRAFT please do not cite or circulate without the author s permission Abstract This paper critically analyses the emergence of expertise on, and the professionalization of, public participation in western democracies, with specific reference to UK developments. It draws on two qualitative studies into the emergence of public dialogue on science and environmental issues in Britain spanning the past decade. These studies involved practitioners in mapping out and reflecting on the emergence of public dialogue expertise during early network development in and when attempts at professionalization had matured in , latterly centred around a Government sponsored expert centre on public dialogue called Sciencewise. Empirical insights reveal three tensions inherent to the dynamics of expertise and professionalization of participation. First, at the level of expertise in designing and mediating participatory practices, practitioner reflections reveal tensions between demands for independence versus the necessity of intervention order to make participation happen. Second, attempts at professionalization highlight conflicts between ambitions to grow, scale up, and ensure quality in participatory practices verses its tendency to strip them of contextual meanings and close down on narrow technologies of dialogue to the exclusion of diverse normativities and expertises of participation. Third, hopes for learning and reflection core principles of many philosophies of participation appear oxymoronic at the level of institutions and wider deliberative systems. These participatory paradoxes can undermine attempts at professionalization, and demand more reflexive forms of learning that better account for the exclusions, uncertainties, diversities and politics of participation. Keywords: Public participation expertise, mediators, technologies of participation, professionalization, ecologies of participation, reflexivity. Introduction Arguably one of the most important recent developments in the field of public participation has been the rise of a more critical and reflexive mode of research. This is distinct from a first strand of research that has focused on developing public engagement practices (e.g. OECD, 1979; Joss and Durrant, 1995), and a second centred on evaluating their effectiveness (e.g. Rowe and Fewer, 2000), in moving towards critical studies of the construction, performance, power, and politics of public participation in science and environment (Irwin 2006; Irwin et al. 2013; Chilvers, 2009). Such research in Science and Technology Studies (STS), political science, and cognate disciplines has shown that, rather than simply serving as a remedy, innovations in participatory governance can reintroduce the dynamics and problems of 1 Science, Society and Sustainability (3S) Research Group, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. jason.chilvers@uea.ac.uk 1

2 technoscientific expertise through: framing and constructing the public and citizenship in powerful ways (Irwin, 2001; Felt & Fochler, 2010); imposing narrow, institutionally defined, meanings of democratic engagement and public issues (Wynne, 2007); having the potential to close down appraisals, commitments, and wider policy discourses in technology choice (Stirling, 2008); (re)constructing a deficit model and limiting institutional reflexivity (Wynne, 2006); and being conditioned by the driving forces of political economic influences and neoliberalisation (Goven, 2006; Pestre, 2008). In moving beyond the use of critical social science analyses of public engagement as a rationale for participatory processes, or judging whether they are good or bad against Habermasian or other normative principles which assume that what constitutes democracy or citizenship is known in advance, Irwin (2006) captured the essence of this third wave of research very well in stating that such inquiry should view the new scientific governance as a legitimate object of study in itself (p.310), treat public engagement processes as social experiments in themselves (p.317) and focus on the social construction of participation and public talk. In this perspective, rather than simply being an input to participatory policymaking processes and existing in some natural state waiting to be discovered, public opinion and social concerns can be more accurately viewed as the outcome of heavily mediated and co-produced participatory experiments. This highlights public participation as a phenomenon in itself, which has effects, in producing publics, expertise, citizenship, and democracy (Irwin, 2006; Lezaun, 2007; Marres, 2007; Laurent, 2011). A relatively neglected object of inquiry in this emerging vain of research is the production of public participation expertise associated with the rise of mediators and facilitators as a new category of expert, their roles and interventions in assembling technologies of participation, and how these instruments and related forms of expertise become more or less stabilised and have effects as they move and travel around the world (although see Elam et al. 2007; Lezaun, 2007; Chilvers, 2008). It is these themes that form a key focus of this paper. In many ways there appears to be a paradox lying at the heart of such expertise. Facilitators and mediators remain largely invisible, or are otherwise seen as neutral, in both the products of participatory processes and writings on deliberative democratic theory and practice (Moore, 2012). Yet, deliberative processes would not happen without continual work and interventions by facilitators who are adopting increasingly powerful roles in mediating relations at the science-policy-society interface. Over the years, studies of public participation have shown a predilection for isolated casebased accounts. This paper builds on and moves beyond this level of understanding to explore how expertises and technologies of participation are viewed, produced, and mobilised in wider participatory governance networks. It does this through reporting on recent in-depth studies that involved public participation experts and mediators in reflecting on experiments, expertise and technologies of public dialogue on science and technology in Britain. From this three main analytical themes are explored that develop new understandings of: the nature and production of public participation expertise; processes of professionalization, institutionalization and commercialization which bring about particular innovation trajectories in forms of participation; and challenges to the stability of these technologies in the form of alternative, competing and distributed experiments in public dialogue existing in wider ecologies of participation. Before exploring these themes in the sections that follow, conceptual understandings of expertise and technologies of participation are first considered in more detail. Expertise and technologies of participation Facilitators and mediators of public participation processes represent a specific type of what Rose (1999) has called experts of community, who invent, operate and market technologies of community - citizens juries, consensus conferences, focus groups and the like. Such 2

3 technologies of elicitation can be viewed as instruments produced in transient, ephemeral and experimental time-spaces to generate public views on the issues in question and feed them into the policy process (Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). These expertises and technologies of participation have become established as part of an emerging and globally-connected public engagement industry involved in the transnational circulation of expertise, people and skills as well as particular participatory techniques or configurations such has the consensus conference model as it travels across national contexts (Seifert, 2006). The professionalization and commercialization of participation spans science and environment domains in the UK and Europe (Chilvers, 2008), deliberative goods and services in Australasia and the US (Hendricks and Carson, 2008), through to participatory development in the global south (Kothari, 2005). The specialists involved in these emerging networks belong to a new category of expert and expertise, that of the mediator, which for Osborne (2004) resembles an enabler, catalyst and broker of knowledge, always in the middle of things. Mediation is thus integrally public, collective and interactive (p.443). Mediators orchestrate and assemble participatory experiments in particular time-spaces through enrolling heterogeneous assemblages of participants, procedures, social science theories, methodologies, and other artefacts. The inclusions and exclusions that define the enunciation and eventual constitution of these ethno-epistemic assemblages (Irwin and Michael, 2003) highlight the productive ways in which approaches to mediation construct the object (i.e. the issue) and subjects (i.e. the participants) of participation (Marres, 2007; Callon et al. 2009). In this regard, recent critical studies of public engagement show how forms of mediation, and the ways in which assemblages of participation are configured, produce particular constructions of the public as innocent, pure, interested, affected and so on (Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007; Braun and Schultz, 2010). STS scholars have also revealed how mediators of participatory experiments attempt to fix a particular definition of the issue(s) at stake and isolate this from the conduct of technical participatory procedures, as shown in fields such as the biosciences (Irwin, 2001) and nanotechnology (Laurent, 2011). Lezaun (2007) has further highlighted the work done by professional facilitators to ensure that participatory experiments (in this case focus groups) adhere to particular political philosophies through disciplining participants and managing their reflexivity in order to produce tradable opinions. The mediation of participatory experiments is thus expected to involve the sort of intense boundary work between the competing demands of science, policy and society observed in other areas of science-policy practice (Jasanoff, 1990; Gieryn, 1995; Irwin and Michael, 2003). Following established understandings of technologies as the objectification and standardisation of skills and know-how in the form of artefacts that can be used by others or in different contexts (Rip and Kemp, 1998), technologies of participation can be conceptualised as coming into being where the formats, configurations and skills for enrolling heterogeneous assemblages that make up specific participatory experiments become more or less stabilised, standardised and blackboxed as established designs that can travel from place to place. Powers to enrol heterogeneous actors become stabilised in lasting networks only to the extent that the mechanisms of enrolment are materialised in various more or less persistent forms (Rose and Miller, 1992: ; also Latour, 1987). For technologies of participation this can include participatory techniques, tools, instructions, guidelines, handbooks, facilitation training courses, professional accreditation systems, and so on. Such inscriptions help to stabilise mobile and loosely affiliated networks around particular technologies of participation, which can be seen as technologies of government offering the possibility of governing at a distance (Rose and Miller, 1992; Rose, 1999). Participatory experiments as conceptualised in this paper are not limited to invited-micro level deliberation - or so called mini-publics (Goodin and Dryzek, 2006) - i.e. formal, highly structured, small scale group processes moderated by professional facilitators and organised in terms of host institutions. They are inclusive of diverse formats including more informal 3

4 and distributed macro-level deliberation (Hendriks, 2006) through to uninvited (Wynne, 2007), citizen-led, and spontaneous participation subject to more distributed or rhizomic forms of mediation. Of course, recent interest in uninvited spaces or counterpublics (Hess, 2011), where participatory assemblages mobilise alternative definitions of the science-related public issues at state, has a much longer tradition in studies of public engagement (e.g. Brown and Mikkelsen, 1990; Epstein, 1995). What has been considered much less is the ways in which the aforementioned technologies of participation interact with these more organic and spontaneous instances of participation. This opens up more complex understandings of participatory realities where diverse forms of participation interrelate in broader ecologies of participation. Heath and vom Lehn (2008) use this term to describe multiple and contingent forms of participation by individuals or between individuals in relation to specific interactive exhibits in science museums. A related but altogether different notion of ecologies of participation is proposed in this paper, in terms of the complex interconnectedness and coevolution of diverse participatory experiments and assemblages of participation, subject to multiple forms of mediation, which co-exist within a particular controversy context or political situation. There are at least three main ways, or entry points, through which one can approach studying the expertise and technologies of participation outlined in this section. First, is through situated studies of discrete participatory experiments in terms of how they get made, processes of enrolment, and how they construct the public, public issues, expertise and the products of participation (e.g. Irwin, 2001; Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). Second, an alternative strategy is to follow specific technologies of participation as they become disembedded from particular localities, standardised, move and travel around the world, and are reconstituted in different settings (Elam et al. 2007). A third entry point is the mediators, experts and expertises of participation, including the role and interventions of social scientists and other participation experts in enrolling heterogeneous assemblages and managing deliberation, the nature, construction and circulation of participation experts and expertise, and the networks, collectives, and institutions where they are located (e.g. Lezaun, 2007; Chilvers, 2008). This paper emphasises the latter as an entry point and way of understanding the other two dimensions in terms of technologies and experiments in participation. UK public dialogue on science and technology The research presented in this paper is situated in the context of public dialogue on science and technology in Britain. The rapid expansion, institutionalization and professionalization of public dialogue over the past decade, in a country that has historically lacked broad-based experience in public participation (Jasanoff, 2005), makes it an important site for studying expertises and technologies of participation. These developments can be traced back to at least the late 1990s when, in the wake of the BSE crisis and waning public confidence in science advice, science-public relations in Britain were undergoing a well-documented shift (at least rhetorically) from a emphasis on public understanding of science (PUS) and one-way science communication before the late 1990s to public engagement and two-way/multi-way forms of dialogue since then. This new mood was famously and influentially heralded by the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology s landmark Science and Society report in 2000, which made explicit use of the term public dialogue with reference to approaches of deliberative public engagement and consultation (including the techniques of consensus conferences, citizens juries and stakeholder dialogues). The report also warned, however, that the need for more and better dialogue between the public and science in the United Kingdom requires us to go beyond [such] event-based initiatives (House of Lords, 2000, para 5.18). The four years immediately following the House of Lords report saw a growth in public dialogue practice. A key feature of this early period was the rise of deliberative public engagement processes, which were mainly framed in terms of environmental risk issues such 4

5 as high-profile national processes on GM crops and radioactive waste as well as controversies over waste management at regional and local scales. An epistemic community of deliberative public engagement experts began to emerge around this early public dialogue practice - comprising participatory practitioners (based in consultancies and charities) and academic social scientists - who were advising key science and policy institutions or mediating participatory experiments on their behalf (Chilvers, 2008). This public dialogue network also marked the beginnings of a deliberative public engagement industry which, although highly fragmented, had begun to form into distinct communities of practice based around different technologies of participation. This distinction was most apparent between mediators interested in stakeholder dialogue verses public deliberation based models of dialogue and the public (see Chilvers 2008). In terms of the former, most prominent was the Stakeholder Dialogue approach championed by The Environment Council (TEC), a charity supported by a network of independent facilitators and consultancies. The latter public deliberation model centred on citizen panel type approaches organised by consultancy companies, civil society organisations as well as academic social scientists. Since 2005 onwards UK public dialogue activity has undergone intensifying processes of institutionalization and professionalization, which has coincided with official calls and commitments by UK science and policy institutions to move public engagement further upstream in processes of scientific and technological development (e.g. HM Treasury, 2004; Royal Society, 2004; Wilsdon and Willis, 2004). Central to this drive to both upstream and institutionalise public dialogue was the UK government s move to set up a new organisation called Sciencewise in 2004 following the demise of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science (CoPUS) and in response to the Council for Science and Technology s (CST, 2005) recommendation that government should develop a corporate memory about how to do dialogue well. Relaunched as the Sciencewise Expert Resource Centre for Public Dialogue in Science and Innovation in 2007, Sciencewise has instigated a programme of capacity building, learning and embedding good practice in public dialogue across government and beyond. Over the period Sciencewise has co-funded and guided 17 flagship public dialogue experiments on issues ranging from nanotechnology and stem cell research to synthetic biology and geoengineering of climate change (see Macnaghten and Chilvers, 2012). The methodological and empirical focus of this paper is on research conducted in 2009 that involved mediators from across UK public dialogue networks in in-depth interviews, supported where appropriate by documentary evidence. The interviews made time and space for mediators to reflect on public dialogue practice and participatory governance networks more generally with specific reference to: the nature and construction of public participation expertise; related processes of professionalization and technicalization; and emergent experiments and diverse meanings of public dialogue existing with the network. 21 interviewees were drawn from across UK public dialogue networks based on their: (i) experience of or active involvement in mediating public dialogue; (ii) diversity of roles in relation to public dialogue; and (iii) sector diversity (across public, private, research and NGO/not-for-profit sectors). Respondents included: 6 participatory practitioners (including two from small independent consultancies, two from communications consultancies, and two from market research companies); 4 policy makers from government departments and agencies who commission and use dialogue processes; 4 representatives from think tanks and civil society organisations (including participation organisations); 4 representatives from science institutions; and 3 academics (including two social scientists and one physical scientist involved in public dialogue). Interviews lasted for approximately 1 hour, were audio recorded, fully transcribed, and coded in Atlas.ti qualitative analysis software to identify key analytical themes. The following three sections are structured around these analytical themes, in terms of: respondents in-depth reflections on the nature and construction of public participation expertise; related processes of technicalization and professionalization of public 5

6 dialogue; and the alternative meanings of public dialogue, learning and reflexivity emerging within the network at the time of interviews. Public participation expertise Given that scholars in STS and cognate social science disciplines have been central to both understanding forms of scientific expertise and prompting new modes of public engagement with science, it is perhaps surprising that the notion of public participation expertise has scarcely been directly considered. The basis for such understanding is developed in this section through a grounded analysis of practitioners talk, both in terms of their reflections on the roles and interventions of facilitators in mediating UK experiments in public dialogue and on the nature and character of public participation expertise relating to this. In order to offer deeper insights from what is one of the first academic analyses of public participation expertise, interviews from the 2009 study are analysed in this section in conjunction with evidence from complementary research undertaken by the author early on in the development of UK public dialogue practice (in ). 2 In both instances respondents mainly referred to the mediation of group-based deliberative processes; so called mini-publics, or invitedmicro dialogue in the terms introduced above. A key characteristic of public participation expertise repeatedly expressed by interviewees in both studies was that, while informed by social science theories, training, and methods, it is fundamentally grounded in personal experience, learning by doing, and an ethical commitment to empowerment. Mediators involved early on in the development of UK public dialogue continually emphasised how it takes time to learn from experience and become viewed as an expert in participation. This perspective has continued in the more professionalised context of Sciencewise and its formal learning infrastructure, as this practitioner closely involved in recent Sciencewise dialogues put it: [D]on't expect to know it in five minutes by reading a book and going to a Sciencewise meeting. If you want to get to grips with the complexities and then do it well, it takes a lot of time, a lot of thinking and a lot of experience. (Participatory practitioner, market research company) In this respect, facilitation as a form of expertise was viewed to be more like a learned art, craft, or skill. Related to this highly experiential nature of participation expertise, many practitioners revealed how professionally mediated public participation processes are most often bespoke and designed to be appropriate to local circumstances, or established techniques are tweaked, hybridised, and made to be locally fit for purpose. While particular participatory formats, such as the citizens jury, have undoubtedly become standardised techniques that move and travel around the world, in-depth reflections of mediators brought into question the notion of highly stabilised technologies of participation as purely rational techniques. As this practitioner involved in recent Sciencewise public dialogue experiments on issues of climate change and emerging biotechnologies noted: It s difficult to generalise because every single project that we do is bespoke, it is tailor made and there is no such thing as off the shelf expertise, like if you've done ABC, you can do XYZ. (Public engagement practitioner, science institution) In addition to this experiential emphasis a further theme central to practitioners talk in both the 2009 study and earlier interviews highlighted the embodied nature of public participation 2 This earlier study employed a similar methodology, involving 26 interviewees in 1-2 hour long in-depth interviews to reflect on evolving public dialogue practice at the time. A similar range of interviewees were selected, according to the same criteria used in the current study. Further details of the methodology used in this study are provided in Chilvers (2008). 6

7 expertise. One social scientist able to reflect across the roles of facilitators in mediating earlier citizen and stakeholder-based dialogues on GM crops and waste management captured the sense of this very well: That makes them very stressful processes to actually develop and in my experience of the individuals that I have worked with they have to be somewhat special people to be able to run these types of processes. (Academic social scientist) Interviewees taking up different roles across the Sciencewise network in the current study similarly often referred to the need for mediators of public dialogue to be an extraordinary amazing person (Participatory practitioner, civil society organization) and posses the right personality (Participatory practitioner, government agency) to successfully mediate upstream public dialogues. The right person being imagined here most often had the ability to reconcile multiple perspectives and embody the inherent tension of simultaneously intervening in and remaining neutral in dialogue processes. In many respects this represents a defining feature of public participation expertise and a dynamic written through all interviews i.e. the constant tension between the irreconcilable demands of independence and neutrality verses intervention and artificiality in attempting to achieve good public dialogue. This is what Lezaun (2007) has called the chameleon-like qualities and kaleidoscopic identity of those that mediate deliberative processes. Many respondents emphasised the need to create a neutral space (Participatory practitioner, civil society organization) in dialogue processes, stating that it s the facilitators job to be neutral and independent (Participatory practitioner, government agency). This was held in constant tension with the need to intervene in framing or anchoring the issue in question, ensuring fair deliberation, producing the products of participation, and so on. Central to practitioners reflections in both the current study and earlier interviews, then, was frequent reference to the boundary work (Gieryn, 1995) that goes into maintaining a distinction between a facilitator s process expertise and technical procedures from: (i) the science and technology-related issue forming the focus of public dialogue; (ii) process participants and other competing participatory assemblages; and (iii) decision-making and the wider policy world. These three aspects are now explored in turn for the remainder of this section. First, with regard to the science-related issue forming the object of participation, when reflecting on public participation expertise practitioners in earlier interviews and to some extent the 2009 study often spoke about technical participatory procedures irrespective of the actual issues involved, as if technologies of participation could be unproblematically applied to any issue. This perspective was illustrated by this participatory practitioner, from a government agency that has supported the delivery of governmental public dialogue: it doesn't particularly matter to us as a facilitator whether you're talking with the public, business or within government. We don't even have to know about the subject particularly, just to ask the right questions and design a process that gets people out at the other end. (Participatory practitioner, government agency) Yet at the same time this operated in tension with the requirement for experts of participation to have at least some ability to grasp the issues involved in order to effectively mediate public dialogue while not being a substantive expert in the area, as this social scientist stated when reflecting more broadly on recent developments in the UK public dialogue field: It s better to be independent... you know in terms of the process. But that having been said, [facilitators] need to have the professional competence to grasp the scientific issues. (Academic social scientist) 7

8 Second, in a similar way to these relationships between participatory procedures and the science-related issue in question, tensions were evident in the way mediators of public dialogue construct boundaries between their own procedural techniques and the subjects of participation (i.e. participants themselves) and/or alternative expressions of public issues in wider society. While equally evident in earlier interviews as well as the current study, a revealing insight into this dynamic was offered in the former, with reference to invited small group deliberative processes such as citizens panels and community advisory committees (CACs) applied to issues of waste management (including radioactive waste). These reflections from two practitioners closely involved in the development of early UK public dialogue practice illustrate very well the simultaneous burden and tensions involved in balancing between naturalness (whereby participants go on their own self-determined personal journey, mediators allow participants to speak through them, and the products of participation to emerge naturally ) and intervention (where participants behaviour and reflexivity is controlled to make it fit with the design blueprints of a particular technique or to ensure discursive ethics relating to equality of access to the deliberation): [T]he common thing is that people have to go on a journey. They have to define for themselves what are the issues, they have to find out what is the history to date, why is there an issue, and then they have to come to their own conclusions after listening to experts. (Participatory practitioner, private consultancy) [T]hey re literally sort of off the shelf... And the people have to squeeze into the process, and the issue and the people and everything needs to squeeze into the process. (Participatory practitioner, civil society organisation) Furthermore, efforts in mediation often involved insulating, or enhancing the responsiveness of, transient time-spaces of formal invited deliberative processes (such as citizens panels and CACs) in relation to competing participatory assemblages and uninvited spaces of engagement occurring outside as part of wider ecologies of participation in particular controversy contexts, as this interviewee noted continuing with the waste example: All the counter debate going on tends to make the process itself that you re in the middle of have to be highly reactive and responsive to what s going on outside They have all suffered this sort of challenge from outside when this sort of participation is going on, particularly in the dioxin area. (Academic social scientist) The third dimension of boundary work evident in practitioners talk concerned connections with decision-making and the policy world. In this regard an important component of public participation expertise expressed by respondents was the ability and skill of mediators to make connections and maintain distinctions between participatory experiments on the one hand and policy and policy-making on the other. This point was repeated by a number of actors central to Sciencewise and its wider network, including this practitioner when reflecting upon recent upstream public dialogue practice across the Sciencewise portfolio including the areas of nanotechnology, emerging biotechnologies, and energy futures: [T]here are other people who are really good facilitators, who will really run a group well but don't have the experience of the whole policy influencing process. So they ll do their little bit or they re quite good at bringing stakeholders together and analysing who should be in the room and so on, but less good at seeing that as part of the whole process of actually changing policy. (Participatory practitioner, private consultancy) Interfacing with policy in this way was seen to involve negotiation and persuasive skills (Academic scientist) beyond the experimental setting in order to enhance the value and productivity of public dialogue. This boundary work is reflected more broadly in structural relations in UK public dialogue networks, where the outsourcing of dialogue and reliance on 8

9 external mediators maintains their distance from policy while allowing decision institutions and participation experts to influence the optimal framing of public debate. Reflecting on this analysis, it appears that the aforementioned expertise and interventions of mediators in public dialogue was not only necessary for the successful generation of participatory experiments and their products. The embodied nature of participatory expertise, coupled with careful boundary work in relation to science, politics and society, has allowed mediators to mobilise both themselves as experts and associated technologies of participation. This was certainly the case in the years immediately following House of Lords report in 2000 when certain mediators of public dialogue were able to move, often with great ease, between assembling participatory experiments in distinct environmental risk issue domains, such as switching between areas of radioactive waste management and GMOs (see Chilvers, 2008). Furthermore, practitioner reflections in the current study illustrate how deliberative technologies of participation have been copied cross from these downstream domains into areas of anticipatory governance of emerging technologies, though not unproblematically (Chilvers, 2010). In a detailed study of the making of consensus conferences on the subject of nanotechnology in the U.S. and France, Laurent (2009) has also shown how solidifying a boundary between the issue and the procedure is central to stabilizing and standardizing participatory devices which allows some actors (and notably private companies) to make the procedure travel and replicate it across various technological issues (p.30). Technicalization, professionalization and innovation pathways in public dialogue Public participation expertise, of the sort just outlined, forms part of an emerging global public engagement industry and has become an established category at the science-policysociety interface. The rapid growth in institutionally commissioned public dialogue on science and technology in the UK means that processes of institutionalisation, technicalization and professionalization have been particularly apparent in this national context. In-depth interviews with mediators of public dialogue in the current study, which took place at a high point of institutional public dialogue activity in Britain in 2009, provide insights into these dynamics, their implications and effects. More specifically these interviews offer reflections on the processes and inscriptions that codify forms of mediation, mechanisms of enrolment, and definitions of participation into more or less persistent forms, and establish particular trajectories of innovation in public dialogue. This second analytical theme is explored in this section in relation to two key developments in the Sciencewise network in recent years, namely: (i) drives to institutionalise and professionalise public dialogue: and (ii) mechanisms of resource allocation related to the emergence of a public dialogue market. As outlined above, quite distinct networks of public participation experts had emerged around competing stakeholder and public models of invited micro dialogue in the early years immediately after In reflecting back on the development of UK public dialogue since this initial period almost all interview respondents emphasised increasing institutionalization, professionalization and growth of a dialogue industry in the second half of the decade and with this the production of a more coherent and to some extent stabilised model of public dialogue. The dominant meaning of public dialogue in this post-2005 period was seen to be an invited-micro public deliberation model with an emphasis on enrolling and constructing disinterested publics and innocent citizens. This vision of participation and the public, which had dominated policy discourses surrounding the emblematic GM Nation? public debate in 2003 (Irwin, 2006; Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007), had become further entrenched in later moves to upstream engagement under the auspices of Sciencewise. While linguistically this more avowedly public model of public dialogue represented a hybridization of the two previously distinct models of public deliberation and stakeholder dialogue, in practice it reflected the waning importance of the stakeholder dialogue model in UK participatory politics, as this practitioner summarised: 9

10 The [stakeholder] dialogue community, we ve been quite reactionary to that I think and quite protective of what we do but we ve not been very good at expressing what that particular stuff that we do is and the most extreme example of that is The Environment Council not capturing the convening type of role. They didn't do that and then at the same time the language of dialogue got taken on by Sciencewise in a non-dialogue kind of way and you ve got Opinion Leader Research coming in and branding things, you've got citizen summits and deliberative this and that. (Participatory practitioner, independent consultant) In addition to strong evidence from interviews, this shift was clearly evident in documentary evidence of actual public dialogue experiments. The majority of public dialogues cosponsored by Sciencewise, in period from 2005 up until the time of interviews in 2009, were based on invited-micro public deliberation centred on a citizen panel type model. Of the 13 Sciencewise co-sponsored dialogues that were active during this period 10 enrolled public participants (who were often paid an incentive, had no strong prior interest in the issue, and reflected key socio-demographic characteristics of a specific locality) into small group deliberative events held at multiple sites in different regions across the UK which were then reconvened, often involving participants from different sites being brought together in a final workshop at a central location (for overviews see Chilvers, 2010; Warburton, 2010; Macnaughten and Chilvers, 2013). These 10 experiments all involved publics interacting with specialists and expert witnesses. They were centrally enunciated and mediated by professional facilitators contracted by host science and policy institutions. Five of these dialogues exclusively employed this multi-sited reconvened citizen panel model including the Industrial Biotechnology dialogue, the Forensic use of DNA dialogue, the Nanodialogues, the Big Energy Shift, and the Trustguide dialogue. The other five dialogues took this same general citizens panel model as the central component used in conjunction with other assistive or scaling up techniques including: an online consultation (Drugsfutures dialogue); a national opinion poll (Synthetic Biology dialogue, Hybrids and Chimeras dialogue); stakeholder interviews (Stem Cells dialogue); and outreach to wider interested public groups (Sciencehorizons dialogue). This dominant approach was replicated in dialogues commissioned by other UK science policy organisations over the same time period, including UK Research Council processes on nanotechnology for healthcare and energy futures (e.g. Ipsos-MORI, 2007; BMRB, 2008). The central place and consistency of this multi-sited reconvened citizen panel model is really quite striking given that all 10 dialogue processes had different contractors, steering groups, commissioning bodies, decision-makers and addressed different science and technology-related issues. There are a number of possible explanations for this shift and greater coherence around a particular meaning of UK public dialogue on science and technology. Here two key developments deemed particularly important in interviews are considered, as stated at the beginning of this section. First, the establishment of Sciencewise as a formal participation organisation, and through this attempts to promote and improve the practice of public dialogue and professionalize the field, began to inscribe and codify a particular definition of public dialogue and the formats, configurations and skills for enrolling heterogeneous assemblages that make up public dialogue experiments (Rose and Miller, 1992). A Steering Group comprising representatives from government, industry, participatory practice, and academic social science was formed early on in the establishment of Sciencewise which agreed on a particular definition of public dialogue, stated in published guidance as: a two-way conversation with members of the public, to inform decision-making on science and technology issues [It] is a process during which members of the public interact with scientists, stakeholders and policy makers to deliberate on issues likely to be important in future policies (Sciencewise-ERC, 2009). 10

11 Evident within this vision is the centrality of public participants, with interested stakeholders being positioned in a more peripheral, supportive or assistive role. Alongside scientists and policy makers, stakeholders are actors who publics are in dialogue with rather than being actual subjects of the dialogue themselves. A key ambition of Sciencewise within government and beyond was to grow the number of possible people who can do [public dialogue] well (Academic scientist) and begin to mainstream all this a bit more effectively (Participatory practitioner, social research company). This drive to grow and promote best practice through a learning infrastructure and networking activities further codified and inscribed the Sciencewise vision of proper public talk through training courses and mentoring schemes, knowledge exchange mechanisms including a web-based knowledge hub, and associated systems of evaluating the effectiveness of public dialogue processes (see Chilvers, 2013). As part of this support network Sciencewise assembled a team of Dialogue and Engagement Specialists (DES) to mentor and advise commissioners of public dialogue processes (Warburton, 2010). This included a number of participation experts from the Stakeholder Dialogue community who were deemed by some to have got a stranglehold on Sciencewise (Participatory practitioner, independent consultant) but had in fact become enrolled into an innocent citizen problematisation of participation (Latour, 1987), though not without some degree of resistance and much ambivalence (as the practitioner quote earlier in this section testifies). A second key development expressed in interviews, that helps explain the production of a more stabilised vision of public dialogue and the prioritisation certain technologies of participation over others, was structures of resource allocation and the related growth and commercialization of a public dialogue market. For all interviewees one of the most striking developments from the mid-decade (2005) onwards has been the growth of a public engagement industry driven by government funding, which has also meant that the resourcing and control of public dialogue has become centralised around UK science and policy institutions. This was highlighted by the following two statements from interviewees closely involved in Sciencewise dialogues: [T]he combination of wider government funds and things like Sciencewise, has meant that money is there much more now and it s attracted professional agencies basically moving in, more traditional market research agencies (Participatory practitioner, consultancy company). [W]hen our projects were initially funded, Sciencewise was providing grants to run projects whereas it s obviously changed its focus significantly and now a project is commissioned by a policy maker [O]bviously many people would perceive government therefore taking a much firmer grip on what a process may look like and therefore potentially steering the process. (Science and society manager, science institution) From a situation where independent facilitators and smaller groups (including charities and academic social scientists) took on mediator roles early on in the development of UK public dialogue, almost all interviewees noted that in step with the growth of a dialogue market - the field had become increasingly captured by larger consultancy companies which had taken over (Participatory practitioner, participation organisation) and obliterated all the rest of the range of different approaches (Participatory practitioner, independent consultant). This was particularly the case with large market research companies such as the British Market Research Bureau (BMRB), Ipsos-MORI and Opinion Leader Research (OLR) that had developed capabilities in deliberative processes and were able to drawn on close ties and long track records in providing evidence of public opinion to government departments based on statistically representative national surveys of the general public (Osborn and Rose, 1999). For most interview respondents, the introduction of formal mechanisms for resource 11

12 allocation, called framework contracts, played a crucial role in this transformation of UK public dialogue networks. These instruments had been introduced by organisations commissioning public dialogue processes, including government departments and agencies, in order to identify and maintain recognised lists of participatory experts deemed sufficiently qualified to provide advice and support. There was a sense that such mechanisms served to privilege the so-called big players and thus further stabilise networks around particular visions of participation, public dialogue and expertise associated with them: [Y]ou've got all the big players in there like Ipsos-MORI and OLR and that just keeps getting reinforced by things like these framework contracts so it s not impossible to envisage that soon you can t do any central government work unless you do it through the back door, unless you're on one of those framework contracts, and to get on a framework contract you have to have all the things that big organisations are required to have which many of us independents don t have (Participatory practitioner, independent facilitator). In further extending the idea of technologies of participation, democratic innovations in the UK field of public dialogue on science and technology can be seen to have followed a particular innovation pathway and exhibit some of the classic features of lock in (Arthur, 1989) so often seen in other areas of scientific and technological development. Over the post period considered in this section, highly centralised forms of resourcing and control around science and policy institutions, structures and processes for allocating resources (such as framework contracts), processes of professionalization and commercialization, and other discursive and infrastructural attachments, served to close down and to some extent lock in commitments to invited-micro forms of public dialogue, centred on innocent citizens. Whilst it is clear that a number of respondents in the current study held concerns over trends towards the professionalization and commercialisation of public participation, including the potential for it to compromise the ethical integrity of participation, two alternative views were also evident. Some practitioners and policy makers maintained that professionalization is essential to enhance the quality and scale of public dialogue, while most interviewees conceded that both professionalization and democratisation of the public dialogue field is both necessary and inevitable. Collectively these reflections emphasise a further paradox of participation in that the very processes that allow expertises and practices of participation to be mobilised, scaled up, and travel around the world also serve to strip them of their contextual meanings, diversity, politics, and purposes. Ecologies of participation At the time of interviews in 2009 cracks were beginning to appear in this dominant version of UK public dialogue. Whilst it was recognised by all interviewees, a subset of respondents also highlighted different meanings of public dialogue and actively identified alternative instances of participatory experimentation. Most notable in this regard were academics, representatives of NGOs/civil society organisations and a lesser number of participatory practitioners and representatives from science institutions. Not only did this begin to question the stability of the vision of public dialogue that had become reified in the Sciencewise network, it also highlighted a diverse array of possible pathways for democratic engagement in emerging areas of science and innovation and multiple routes by which citizens can come to define public issues. Within this final analytic theme emerging from the interviews three broad alternative forms of public dialogue were evident in practitioners talk, namely: invited-macro public dialogue; do-it-yourself (DIY) public dialogue; and citizen-led (or uninvited) public dialogue. In terms of invited-macro public dialogue the aforementioned subset of respondents highlighted participatory experiments that take the form of informal, unstructured public 12